Dok Ameri ekraniziraju Stephena Kinga, Portugalci ekraniziraju Barbey d’Aurevillyja, Zweiga, čak i Roberta Musila. Likovi "filozofiraju" o umjetničkim djelima, književnosti, mistici. I sve je to, naravno, uzaludno.
Užitak u tome da su karte davno podijeljene. Kostimirani mauzolej kao utopijski nihilizam.
A Woman's Revenge (2012)
Roberto is one of those men to whom simulation has become the greatest art. He is an unmoved, inscrutable, mysterious man. But the truth is that Robert feels an intimate, deep tedium. The boredom of those who have already exhausted all the pleasures of life. The only thing still surprising him is the fact that nothing surprises him anymore. One evening he has an overwhelming encounter with a woman. For his own bewilderment, he discovers the sublime horrors in which the woman has sank.
The Portuguese Woman (A Portuguesa) (2018)
North of Italy, the von Ketten dispute the forces of the Episcopate of Trent. Herr Ketten seeks marriage in a distant country, Portugal. After their honeymoon journey back home, Ketten leaves again for the war. Eleven years elapsed… Rumours are running about the presence of that ‘foreign’ in the castle. Some say she’s a heretic. Until one day, the Bishop of Trento ends up dying and, with the signature of peace, falls the background of von Ketten’s life. Will the Portuguese win, where death seems to be moving in?
Correspondências (2016)
Jorge de Sena was forced to leave his country. First he moved to Brazil, and later to the USA. He never returned to Portugal. During his 20-year-long exile, he kept an epistolary correspondence with Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen. These letters are a testimony of the profound friendship between the two poets, letters of longing and of desire to “fill years of distance with hours of conversation”. Through excerpts and verses, a dialog is established, revealing their divergent opinions but mostly their strong bond, and their efforts to preserve it until their last breaths.
Frágil Como o Mundo (2001)
An impossible love. Two young people who love each other. Vera and Juan can’t find in this life the space, time, or identity to resolve their love story.
Rita Azevedo Gomes: The Correspondences of Beauty
“It doesn’t really matter where things come from. What matters is picking things up again, mess them up, try to push them forward in a different way. All of us do it, we’ve all been doing it all through time, and things haven’t really changed that much since Greece. What we can try is to do something that seems to be new, or that is shown in a whole different way—even if not necessarily intentionally.”
In a way, that’s what Rita Azevedo Gomes has been doing through her career as a filmmaker. A career, avowedly, somewhat confidential—her latest fiction, The Portuguese Woman, is only her 9th film since her 1990 debut O Som da Terra a Tremer—but one that has been quietly snowballing since 2012’s The Revenge of a Woman, to her own surprise, became a firm festival favorite.
Her 2016 poetic documentary essay Correspondences gained a main competition berth in Locarno. And, after premiering at Mar del Plata 2018, The Portuguese Woman was much acclaimed in the Berlinale Forum. Azevedo Gomes has also just premiered a new work in FIDMarseille’s official competition: Danses macabres, squelettes et autres fantaisies, a collaboration with filmmaker Pierre Léon and theorist Jean-Louis Schefer.
The collaborative nature of Danses macabres… is only the latest link in a chain of connections that at some point becomes a true rabbit’s den. Based on a 1924 novella by Austrian writer Robert Musil set in the Middle Ages, The Portuguese Woman was adapted for the screen by the legendary Portuguese novelist Agustina Bessa-Luís, a close collaborator of Manoel de Oliveira and someone whose writing inspired many of the late master’s finest works, like Francisca (1981) and Abraham’s Valley (1993).Bessa-Luís and Azevedo Gomes had already worked together in the 2005 short A Conquista de Faro, produced by another late Portuguese master, Paulo Rocha.
These are only two of the many “correspondences” you can make between Azevedo Gomes and key names in Portuguese art cinema. Another stems from her “day job” as programmer and art director for the Portuguese Cinemathèque, where she was a close accomplice of João Bénard da Costa, the critic and programmer that ran the institution from 1991 to 2008 and influenced generations of Portuguese cinephiles. In 2007, Azevedo Gomes shot A 15ª Pedra, the record of a two-hour encounter between Bénard da Costa and Oliveira, and a film she described, smiling, as a “personal confessional”: “I wanted to catch those two beings that were so important for my life together, on film, as I saw them in real life.” Bénard da Costa—under his acting nom de plume Duarte d’Almeida—also acted in films by both directors; it’s no surprise that Oliveira often props up when discussing Azevedo Gomes’ output.
Yet make no mistake: the filmmaker refuses all sorts of comparisons and prefers to see herself in a very specific lineage of filmmakers, both canonical and non-canonical. “I’m very honored to be compared to Manoel, but that would make me freeze,” as she said in Berlin, last February, while presenting The Portuguese Woman. “I’m also a lover of Ingmar Bergman, and, if I was Swedish, people would say I’m a disciple of Bergman… Yet I’m as much a disciple of Bergman as I am of Oliveira, of Carl Theodor Dreyer, of Werner Schroeter… and also of Titian or Caravaggio. All of them are present, but none of them are in my head when I’m shooting.”
Too many influences, she thinks, end up “poisoning the well”: “Every time I try to do something in the manner of someone else, Bergman for instance, it always turns out crap. And it’s terrible because that ruins you; it means that, obviously, I’ll never be able to make it like he did it. I don’t like the feeling, when I’m making a film, of suddenly remembering how somebody else did something, because I’ll never be able to reproduce it.”
A Woman's Revenge
Instead, Azevedo Gomes prefers to add something personal to those tropes—if you look at her filmography, you will find a peculiar desire for experimenting. Correspondences, for instance, is nominally an essay about the correspondence between two of Portugal’s greatest 20th century poets, Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen and Jorge de Sena. But instead of doing a traditional documentary, Azevedo Gomes placed actors (regulars like Rita Durão, Luís Miguel Cintra, or Francisco Nascimento) and non-actors (including programmer and critic Boris Nelepo or writer and filmmaker Pierre Léon), reading from the poets’ letters in living rooms, kitchens, patios, even seashore caves, and using period footage to fill in historical blanks. The result is a series of tableaux that can seem carefully composed, but were actually shot “on the fly”—the film was built piecemeal from takes shot with friends and acquaintances over a number of years, like a series of personal home movie reminiscences assembled into a cohesive, heterogeneous whole.
Azevedo Gomes assumes that experimentation. “I love challenges, I love to experiment, to find out how you do something, to try new things. That’s something I’m always willing to do. Even in a film like The Revenge of a Woman, which had a very rooted starting point, with a lot of text, it worked as a foundation, a source over which I could experiment with something different: making a scene with a lot of cuts in a place in a film constructed mostly of long one-take shots… It’s not inside me to make a film that would be ‘correct.’ Other people do it so much better than me.”
At the same time, part of the experimental nature of her work comes from the production limitations. In a film scene like Portugal’s, where budgetary issues make for a permanent struggle, Azevedo Gomes has made her entire career as an outsider scraping together the money for her work, either self-producing with the help of friends or collaborating every now and then with more established production houses.Her 2002 experimental fiction Altar was shot very much on her own, and the constraints imposed by the tight budget contributed to its austere visuals. Veteran producer Paulo Branco backed her second feature Frágil como o Mundo (2001), while Joana Ferreira and Isabel Machado’s CRIM Productions were behind Correspondences and The Revenge of a Woman.
This last work, based on the 1874 novella by French writer Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly and with a stunning lead performance from Rita Durão, was in fact the film that made Azevedo Gomes’ name known internationally. Its theatrical, distanced staging is a good example of her penchant for narrative experimentation. In The Revenge of a Woman you can already find the seeds of The Portuguese Woman: the idea of a narrator introducing the tale of a noblewoman fallen in disgrace has both a continuation and an inversion in the new film. Instead of an on-screen narrator (João Pedro Bénard in The Revenge of a Woman), we have Ingrid Caven, one of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s (and modern art cinema’s) muses, playing a sort of “Greek chorus” that appears out of nowhere at regular intervals, as a ghostly, out-of-time presence that punctuates and silently comments on the work.
At times, Caven seems to be a distorted mirror image of the title character, an imperious dame in medieval times, played by fiery-haired Clara Riedenstein (the revelation of João Nicolau’s John From), unwilling to submit to the patriarchal society of the times. The German actress seems to be a flesh-and-blood portrait of Dorian Gray, showing the trials of time, while the real woman remains immaculate. Azevedo Gomes is intrigued by the connection—after all, her work has often referred to classic art—but hadn’t thought at all of Oscar Wilde’s book.
Instead, she speaks of contemporaries of Musil in early 20th century Europe, and especially of artist Paul Klee. “I was trying to explain to Ingrid something that was somewhat unexplainable: hers wasn’t exactly a role, it was more of a presence. And in the conversation something came up that helped us both: Paul Klee’s drawing Angelus Novus, the one that Walter Benjamin wrote an essay on. You know, the small drawing of the cutest angel with wings, being blown away by the wind, who, upon seeing all the world in ruins, all the rubbish that mankind shows us every day, wants to restart everything, rebuild everything from the ruins... That’s when everything started to make sense, and she had something to go on, something she could draw from.”
Quoting from Benjamin and Klee comes naturally to a filmmaker well-versed in classical art and classical filmmaking. After all, the new work, Danses macabres, is a collaboration with kindred spirits, a sort of museological road movie as Azevedo Gomes, Léon, and Jean-Louis Schefer contemplate and discuss art. In Berlin, Ingrid Caven spoke reverently of the director’s knowledge of art and culture, “the old beauties” as she says, and of her painterly eye for framing and staging.
But Azevedo Gones herself prefers to shy away from that. “It’s very difficult for us to define beauty, isn’t it?” she said. “Maybe there’s something about eternity, continuation… Beauty is a very personal thing. It’s not just about memory, it's about a state of enchantment for one another.” The exact state her films try to recreate in the viewer. - Jorge Mourinha
https://mubi.com/notebook/posts/rita-azevedo-gomes-the-correspondences-of-beautyThe 15th Stone / ‘A 15a. Pedra’, 2007.
Joáo Bénard da Costa, director of the Portuguese National Film Archives [deceased in 2009], interviews the dean of contemporaneous film directors [96-years-old then]. Two humanists of different philosophical backgrounds, both with their long, entire lives dedicated to culture in general (music, painting, literature) and to film in particular, discuss freely, sometimes haltingly, the director’s power as a creator or a magician, the philosophy beyond particular scenes in classic movies, film technique, the importance of color, sound and music to films, art versus entertainment, and much more. Their talk takes place in a museum room, seating in front of “The Annunciation” (a 1510 oil painting by João Vaz, a Portuguese artist), which eventually leads to a discussion of ‘Leonardo da Vinci’, and the relationship between a trend-setter master and his disciples
The Sound of the Shaking Earth, 1990.
Freely based on Gide (‘Paludes’) and Hawthorne (‘Wakefield’), this is a film about a writer who never wrote anything and who blows at nightfall the breath of frost. The poem by Carlos Queiroz to which the above sentences belong is not cited in ‘O som da Terra a Tremer’, but the atmosphere is that, between written letters never received. Fiction within fiction, stories within stories, like those Chinese boxes in which there is always one inside another. Or the two margins of the same river, always being lateral.
The Invisible Collection, 2009.
A story about art and educated men, and how their art and culture reveal themselves useless in the face of the harsh realities of the 20th century life.
“War is made of debt, and peace is the conduit of corruption and vice,” says the Bishop of Trent (Alexandre Alves Costa), eyeing his former enemy upon signing a peace treaty to end the long war between his episcopate and the family of the Lords von Ketten. Historically, it is unclear who these gentlemen really are, as many bishops of Trent have been immersed in wars with rulers of the surrounding territories during the course of history. But dry facts are secondary in The Portuguese Woman helmed by one of the key figures in contemporary Portuguese cinema, Rita Azevedo Gomes, who has taken on another literary challenge. After adapting Stefan Zweig’s The Invisible Collection (2009) and making A Woman’s Revenge (2012), based on a story from Jules Amedée Barbey d’Aurevilly’s anthology Les Diaboliques, followed by her acclaimed documentary Correspondences [+] (2016), she demonstrates her deep affection for classical literature once again. The Portuguese Woman is a take on Robert Musil’s second of three stories in Three Women, and the screen adaptation was written by Agustina Bessa-Luis.
The film opens with the poem Unter den Linden (“Under the Lime Tree”) by medieval German lyric poet Walther von der Vogelweide, sung by Ingrid Caven in her recognisably out-of-tune manner. She provides a contrast with the spirit of the period drama by being clad in a contemporary black dress. In a strong performance, stumbling through the ruins of the once-rich castle and wild greenery, she’s a kind of (mainly) singing narrator of the story surrounding the titular Portuguese woman (Clara Riedenstein) and her warrior husband Lord von Ketten (Marcello Urgeghe).
Respecting the generations-old custom of not tying the knot with a woman from the surrounding area, von Ketten – a man from the family “cruel as knives that always cut deep” – weds in Portugal and takes his young spouse on a year-long journey back to his family castle near the Brenner Pass, the official Alpine border between Italy and Austria. He is eager to get stuck back into battle over a question of territory, and his wife is left with the servants and the newborn baby to wait for his return. Fast-forward 11 years, and things have barely changed, except for von Ketten’s deteriorating health, caused by a banal insect sting, as well as the appearance of “another Portuguese heretic” – the woman’s cousin, Dom Pero Lobato (João Vicente), whose presence sparks rumours about her infidelity.
By embracing Musil’s deliberate mystification of the timeframe, space and characters to address the perpetual mistakes of humankind and its biggest passion – love – Azevedo Gomes captures the very essence of the original story. All five shooting locations across Portugal bear incredible similarities to the writer’s descriptions, such as the shabby von Ketten castle, for instance. The drab tones of the mist-shrouded landscape at the foot of the mountain imbue Musil’s metaphor for mankind’s dissociation from true values with an extra touch of mystique. In stark contrast with them are the colours of burnt amber, yellow ochre and Prussian blue inside the castle, all adding to the feel of early Flemish painting. Behind the film’s magical cinematography is veteran DoP Acácio de Almeida.
The often-intentional static nature of the actors turns them into powerful tableaux vivants, while the doors to mysterious background spaces gape discreetly, in the manner of Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s hidden, out-of-focus details. The costumes by Rute Correira and Tãnia Franco, while not ostentatious, are masterful down to the smallest detail. Songs and ballads dating from the 12th to the 15th century, two of them composed by José Mário Branco, help keep the time and place fluid.
The Portuguese Woman is rich and varied in its characters, and sophisticated in its challenging dialogue, which is peppered with references to great works of art, literature and mysticism. - Marina Richter
https://cineuropa.org/en/newsdetail/363320/en/video/rdid/343053/en/video/rdid/343053/
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